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“Insert your key in the ignition of a luxury car and the seat and steering wheel will automatically adjust to preprogrammed body proportions … But open any computer program and you’re largely subject to a design team’s ideas about button sizes, fonts and layouts … A new approach to design, developed at the University of Washington, would put each person through a brief skills test and then generate a mathematically-based version of the user interface… Read more →
“New Service Tracks Missing Laptops for Free”
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PC Week describes the Adeona service, created by UW CSE undergraduate Gabriel Maganis.”Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it’s a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.
“But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to… Read more →
“Opening new portals for the blind”
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“WebAnywhere, an Internet-based service released last month, boasts an even better price tag: free. The program’s innovation isn’t so much about what it does — no more than existing Web readers that convert written text to digital speech — as it is about its availability on almost any computer.”… Read more →
CSE’s Jeff Bigham, WebAnywhere in Puget Sound Business Journal
“Just imagine you’re blind and trying to go online at an internet cafe in Paris. Until now, unless you had $1,000 worth of software installed, it was just about impossible. But in recent weeks hundreds of blind people found their worlds opening up online with help from a web-based program called WebAnywhere.
The program was created by Jeffrey Bigham, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. He knew that many applications were moving… Read more →
“Team Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine” tackles the STP
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The 2008 Seattle-To-Portland bicycle tour featured the largest-ever gathering of UW CSE bicycling jerseys. The jerseys — for the “Pastry-Powered T(o)uring Machine” bicycle club, were created by UW CSE alumna Lauren Bricker. The theme for the design of the shirts is UW CSE’s infamous “Steam-Powered Turing Machine” mural.… Read more →
“Computer Science Enrollments: The Real News” (Computing Community Consortium blog)
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CSE’s Ed Lazowska writes, “I regularly get contacted by reporters who read the CRA ‘Taulbee Survey’ and inquire about the current state of computer science undergraduate enrollments. Here’s what I said last night to the most recent reporter who inquired …”
Re-posts with comments:
Quantum Pontiff
Computing Research Policy Blog… Read more →
“Trying to give robots a human touch: UW scientist believes biology key to better-working machine” (Seattle PI)
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“Yoky Matsuoka, professor of computer sciences and engineering at the University of Washington and a 2007 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award, wants robots to function more like human beings. Her lab at the UW – full of mechanical hands, fingers and arm parts – looks like a repair shop for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.”… Read more →
“Project makes web more accessible to blind” (KGO San Francisco)
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UW CSE Ph.D. student Jeff Bigham describes the WebInSight project on KGO TV San Francisco.… Read more →
“Playing the Science Game” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
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“Could the person who finds the cure for cancer be a gamer? The creators of an online game that allows players to help scientists design new proteins with therapeutic properties hope so.” The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses UW’s Foldit game.… Read more →
UW’s Oren Etzioni, Farecast, in Wired (pdf)
“In 2001, Oren Etzioni was on a plane chatting up his seat mates when he realized they had all paid less for their tickets than he did. ‘I thought, ‘don’t get mad, get even,” he says. So he came home to his computer lab at the University of Washington, got his hands on some fare data, and plugged it into a few basic prediction algorithms. He wanted to see if they could reliably foresee changes in ticket prices. It worked:… Read more →